Month: August 2005

I dropped off the face of the earth for about four days due to a 101 degree fever that I then thoughtfully passed along to my seven month old daughter; both of us doing rather better now.

The past two days I’ve been trying to catch up on work and possibly even get ahead a little…which leads into the final part of the title: heading out Friday night for five days on the Maryland shore, hanging out with family, kayaks, food, and drink. Largely offline until next Thursday.

Just so you all don’t miss me too much, I’ll dump out some of the recent blogfodder highlights…

While disagreeing with Bruce Schneier on security topics is generally a good way to be wrong, I can’t share his (kinda) positive take on the recent, successful “MD5 is broken” defense. As Schneier says (and Ed, our head of development reminds me at every opportunity), MD5 is broken, but it’s not broken in any way that appears to be relevant to the case. Where Schneier takes the positive message of “[i]f there’s any lesson here, it’s that theoretical security is important in legal proceedings,” it seems to me like more of an effort to muddy the waters surrounding security issues for personal gain. I don’t believe that this case is actually a model for any productive thinking on the importance of security — theoretical or otherwise.

Nelson’s blog is well worth reading in general. In particular, I loved his post on the One True Email Quoting Style. While it’s true that the OTEQS is also the basis for usenet-clogging “death by a thousand line-by-line rebuttals” debates, I still love it. Oh, and by the way — Nelson is the inventor on Google’s recent RSS advertising patent filing. Still think it should be rejected, but really excellent for Nelson.

AOL acquires XDrive. Yeah, whatever. This is really just an excuse for me to complain again about the fact that no one offers a decent, cheap home storage appliance. All I want is no stupid OS limitations on client machines, minimum of three hot-swappable drives, RAID5, and a nice small form factor. In a world of Nano-ITX motherboards and sub-$1/MB hard drives, is this really so much to ask?